Abstract:

The ambitious timescale of the international fusion reactor development programme implies the increasing role on virtual engineering, creating a strong drive towards the exploration of digital twins and advanced computer models for materials, enabling the assessment of a variety of expected operating conditions. This presentation examines the fundamental principles and applications of self-consistent multiscale materials modelling for predicting the gradual evolution of deformations and stresses at the component and full reactor scale, stemming from the continuous exposure of a mechanically loaded reactor structure to neutron irradiation – a fundamentally atomic scale microscopic phenomenon. In the presentation I shall describe the eigenstrain method for evaluating macroscopic deformations from the density of microscopic defect volume tensor, which can be derived from ab initio and related simulations. I shall also review the dynamic atomic-scale simulation algorithms for treating non-linear high dose effects, the unusual statistics of defect sizes, and experimental observations of complex evolving defect microstructures.

Bio: 

Professor Sergei L. Dudarev leads computational materials science research at UKAEA and the European fusion materials modeling program, holding visiting professorships at University of Oxford, Imperial College London and University of Hong Kong and a distinguished visiting lectureship at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He has authored over 290 papers with 30,000+ citations and a treatise on electron diffraction. His research spans radiation effects, particle scattering, and strongly correlated electron systems, pioneering methods like LSDAU and density matrix theory. His current focus is on virtual fusion reactor models, integrating advanced computational algorithms and multiscale methods to accelerate the development of fusion power by reducing the uncertainties and costs associated with the process of designing innovative nuclear energy systems.